The Craft of Fiction (WH Self Study #2)

The Craft of Fiction includes four full seminars that were originally produced for my Writers' Huddle members-only site, and which are now available on a self-study basis.

The seminars are:

How to Write Dialogue Well, covering:

• The role of dialogue in your story
• How to lay out dialogue correctly
• Ways to make your dialogue more convincing
• Common mistakes that writers make with dialogue
• How to boost your dialogue with scene-setting and actions

Flashbacks: How to Use Them Well and Get Them Right, with Robert Yune, covering:

• When flashbacks are the best technique to give backstory
• How to shift in and out of flashback without confusing the reader
• The biggest mistakes writers make with flashbacks
• More complex uses, such as parallel timelines

Planning, Structuring and Pacing Scenes, with Roz Morris, covering:

• Why you need to start your big-picture planning with characters
• The importance of beginning, middle and end within scenes
• What to do when a scene goes off-the-rails
• How to adjust the pacing of your scenes

Writing Descriptions that Engage Your Reader and Advance Your Story (video), covering:

• Why you need description, and what its function is
• Some different examples of description in novels
• Why you might not need to describe characters much
• Seven ways to make your descriptions stronger

All seminars are audio mp3s unless otherwise indicated. Each seminar comes with a full, nicely edited transcript, plus a downloadable worksheet that includes a summary and suggested further reading.